First of all, a quick note: my website is up and running. I'm still finishing up a few final tweaks (and haven't added any discussion questions to the discussion board yet), but, regardless, it's all ready for you. Check it out!

Now onto a less happy topic: writer's block. Yes, I’ve written about writer’s block before, and so has pretty much every other writer with a blog, but the sad truth is, the problems that writers face tend to arise again and again. It seems the best you can ever hope for is a temporary solution, a short term cessation, before the problem pops up again. And so. Another post about writer’s block. Although, to be fair, this is the first time I’ve written about writer’s block in this blog. Now bear with me here, because I have a lot to say. This is going to be a long one, maybe even a  two parter, as perhaps I’ll follow my writer’s block confessional with some concrete things I did to eradicate it.

So here’s the thing: I’ve been pretty well blocked up for the past four months now. Ever since I found out that my first book was going to be published, I’ve had a hard time really feeling any particular piece of writing. Before the book contract, I was flying through a new draft of a new novel. I was about 50,000 words in, about the halfway point, and well on track to have the draft finished by the end of the summer when, BAM! Everything screeched to a halt. I had to put the new novel aside to edit the book that would actually be published soon, and on top of that I became almost paralyzed with the fear that this book—my first book . . . so much rides on that first book—wouldn’t be very good, and my career as a writer would die at a tragically young age.

While I was working with my editor to get the book in by the deadline—and working on other small tasks such as building a writer’s website, hunting down blurbs, writing my bio, etc. etc.—I became so caught up in the career side of writing, that the writing side of it seemed to get left behind altogether. When I finished the edits and sent the final manuscript in, I foolishly told myself that the block would surely end soon. I hadn’t been too worried about it before because I had sort of been writing during that time—revising still counts, after all—and because it was a happy predicament to be in, anyway: having no stories to submit because all of my ready stories were going to be published together as a book.

But once I had the final manuscript turned in, I felt that I needed to pump out some new stories, and fast. Ever since I got my first publication, I’ve published a minimum of two stories per year. I didn’t want that to taper off, book pub or no book pub. So, if I wanted to get two stories published in 2011, I needed to get some serious work done in the remaining months of 2010.

It seemed like an attainable goal, but every time I sat down to write, it felt like, I don’t know, doing math homework or something. Working on something that you don’t really feel like doing, and having a difficult time of it, besides. I kept telling myself if I just kept forcing it, it would come. I just needed to get my momentum back up. That’s pretty much always been true of my writer’s block in the past, but this time, it just wasn’t coming.

I finally decided that, rather than trying to steamroll over the problem, I should actually sit down and analyze what is happening to me and see if I could pinpoint the reason why. That way perhaps I could come up with a more effective solution than just keep writing, keep writing; ignore the block and maybe it will go away.

The nice part about this particular case is that, since the beginning of the block coincided exactly with a key event in my life—landing my first book contract—I was given a strong hint as to the root of the problem. In fact, the problem seemed pretty obvious as soon as I started really looking for it.

I think I have two desires which are, though it might seem strange, very disparate. I want to be a writer, as in make money off of writing, publish . . . a lot, build up a readership, be, in other words, a success. But that is a very different thing altogether from the desire to write. The verb. To get lost in the words, to become so removed from the physical world around me that the story feels like reality, reality like a story. To think only about the language, the characters, the plot, and not which journal I will submit to, what sort of audience the piece might reach, and how I can use the final product to take another step forward in my career.

Don’t get me wrong, you do have to think about those careery things sometimes if you actually want to get your stuff out there. You can be writing the most beautiful, moving, creative stuff ever, but if you’re not submitting it, no one will ever get to read it. And once you start getting published, it’s natural to want to move forward. Of course I want an agent. Of course I want to reach the widest possible readership.

But none of that really matters if I’m not enjoying the verb side of writing.

I haven’t been able to get sucked into my own stories, and in addition to the fact that it’s quite uncomfortable—I’ve spent too much of my life in a state of blissful distance from reality, thinking through some story or other, that to have that other world closed off to me leaves me in a hazy sort of mental discomfort—it also renders the career side of writing pointless. Yes, I want to be a writer, but then, only because I like to write. If the latter ceases to be true, the former should, too.

No, no, I’m not saying I’m giving up (although the other day, I was wondering, what if I did? What would my life be like if I just decided, eh, I got one book out there. That’s enough. How empty would it be, I wonder? Or would it actually be a strange sort of relief?). What I am going to do, though, is stop worrying so much about publishing. My friend (and writer extraordinaire—she writes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, screenplays . . . is there anything this woman can’t do?) Jayme Russell suggested to me, oh about a month ago, that maybe writing things just to write them and not for the sake of publishing would help break through my writer’s block. I listened to her advice, knew it was good, and yet continued to obsess over getting some new stories out there for the sake of submitting them. 

But now I’m finally seeing the wisdom of Jayme’s words, and I’m going to stop worrying about whether 2011 will be a dry year for me, journal pub-wise. I’m not going to rush to get back into setting goals for submissions, and the goals I did set to get me through the end of this year, well, I’m not going to break my back trying to keep them. I don’t know that I’ll have anything to submit to the Narrative contest by the end of this month, and that’s okay, because it’s worth it if it means stopping forcing the story I was trying to write for that contest and instead working on whatever story successfully carries me away. Regardless of publishability.

I think what I need right now is not motivation through deadlines and that carrot of furthering my career as a writer. What I need right now is to unlock the door to that mental chamber deep inside me, which is growing dusty, I’m afraid, from disuse. I’m going to air it out, clean out the cobwebs, and close my eyes and let it take me wherever it takes me, just like the old days when I wrote because my head was bursting with words and I would go crazy if I didn’t pour them out, and not because I was worried about pub credits and marketability and Ashley Cowger the writer rather than the daydreamer.

Of course, that’s all easy enough to say. What did I do though, to unlock the block? Stay tuned, my friends, and next week, I’ll tell you.